Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 29, 2024

mtlynch.io

Researched creating personal microservices on Nix (probably a future blog post)
- Motivation
  - I want a way to write and run small services on my home infrastructure and feel confident it will keep running and be easy to upgrade
  - I’ve tried this with Ansible, but it’s too brittle
  - I could do it with Docker, but I find it difficult to maintain many services at once
  - I think NixOS could do this really well
Added a new solution for using Nix flakes outside of git
Added a 2.5 year update to my homelab NAS post
- I also finally got a 10 Gbps NIC to work on the NAS, after 1.5ish years of trying
Dropped relLangURL from my templates
- This was part of the initial Hugo template I installed, but it’s just noise on my blog, as I only have a single language
Link to publisher pages for books instead of Amazon for two indie books
Tried Jost font
- I saw it on another site and liked it, but I didn’t like it on mtlynch.io
- I also tried Atkinson Hyperlegible, which looks nice on some other sites, but I preferred my existing fonts more

Refactoring English

Continued working on post about tutorials
Spec’ed out what I want for the cover
Fixed the navbar, which had been broken on mobile
Migrated to Bootstrap 5.3.3
Switched to building and minifying CSS through Hugo

Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

Reopened sales
- It’s in a weird in-between state where I’m not done with the new version and not sure I’ll ever finish, but I turned off sales for the old one when I stopped focusing on it
- I figure I might as well offer it for anyone who wants it

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

Added logic to fetch IMDB IDs for TV shows
- I thought I was doing this all along, but it turns out the TV show API works differently than movies, so you have to fetch TV show IMDB IDs separately
Added logic to update TV show details on new reviews
Fixed old log messages that assumed movies rather than TV shows
Added an admin-only API for force-refreshing TV show metadata
- An easy hack to allow me to pull in IMDB IDs for TV shows I’d reviewed before the fix
Relax rules to allow links in reviews
Added formatting for blockquotes
Updated hot reloading rules to reload on CSS changes
Print review excerpts with formatting stripped
- I was previously printing the raw markdown, but it looked ugly when there was actually markdown in the excerpt

PicoShare is a minimalist web-based file sharing tool I’m working on. I’m often frustrated that I can’t just send someone a link directly to a file because every file-sharing service tries to re-encode images/video or wrap their own viewer around other files, so I’m making a simple self-hostable tool that lets you upload files and share them with other people.

Linked the download count to the download history page

Misc

Ordered a new computer as my main workstation
- I realized I haven’t upgraded my main desktop in nine years, so it’s time for an upgrade
- I’m also going to use this opportunity to try and escape Windows, which I’ve been using since I was six years old. I never made it past Win10, and the experience just keeps getting worse, so I’m going to try to use NixOS as my daily driver.
- I’ve also stopped using most functionality of my Proxmox server, so I’m planning to retire that server and just have a single system for development and web browsing
- The parts
  - CPU: Ryzen 9 7950X
  - Motherboard: Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite
  - Disk: Crucial T705 2TB
  - RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 64 GB
  - Case: Fractal Design Define 7
  - GPU: MSI RTX 4060 Ventus 2X 8G (Migrating from my old desktop)
  - Monitor: Samsung Odyssey OLED G9 (Migrating from my old desktop)
Hosted a small thanksgiving dinner
Installed Intel NIC on my Framework laptop
- It was a pretty bad experience, as the wires are very fussy and hard to keep connected